Alameda House Opens Door On Life of Victorian Family

Vicky Elliott, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, October 29, 1999

1999-10-29 04:00:00 PDT ALAMEDA -- In unhurried Alameda, traffic moves slowly down the leafy, spacious streets. The Meyers House, lovingly restored by volunteers, offers a window onto family life at the turn of the century and a glimpse of a time when Alameda was an up- and-coming township.

In 1897, when Henry H. Meyers moved into 2021 Alameda St. and built the plain Colonial house for $4,000, the island's residents could ride right into San Francisco by rail and ferry. Ambitious entrepreneurs came to settle with their families, lured by developers to this residential mecca with free lunches and watermelon.

There was a railway depot a block away, where Meyers left every day for his architectural offices on Montgomery Street. The train steamed into a huge shed on the waterfront, and you could board the ferry without ever getting wet. The trip to the city took 22 minutes.

Now the redwood sapling planted by Meyers' wife, Bertha, towers above the house, and the pergolas in the garden are covered with wisteria. Jeanette, last surviving of the Meyers' three daughters, left the house to the city of Alameda when she died in 1993 at the age of 88.

The Meyers sisters had hoped their home would become a senior citizens' residence, but the city built another one. So now it is a museum, put together on a shoestring and furnished with the Meyers' possessions and with period antiques from the Alameda Museum.

"We're trying to give the impression," says the museum's curator, George Gunn, "that the Meyers sisters have just walked down the street to go shopping -- that they have left the doors open and invited you into their home."

A MAN WHO 'BUILT SAN FRANCISCO'

Henry Height Meyers was a man of standing and a large mustache who features in an illustrated contemporary roster as one of the "Men Who Built San Francisco."

He started as a carpenter, born in 1867 in Alvarado, as Union City was called then. Then he joined Percy & Hamilton, the architectural firm that put up the 12-story Kohl Building on Montgomery Street, San Francisco's first steel-frame building. It is still there, having made it out of the 1906 quake unscathed, an early blueprint for earthquake-proof construction.

Meyers' firm worked on Alameda's Romanesque City Hall, a handsome red-brick building put up in 1895. As architect for the county of Alameda for 22 years, Meyers designed Alameda's First Presbyterian Church, numerous schools, banks and 10 Veterans Buildings, as well as the striking entrance to the Posey Tube, which connects Alameda with the outside world.

His two elder daughters, Mildred and Edith, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, no mean feat in those days. Mildred, an architect, joined him in his practice, and Edith was a pediatrician with a long association with Oakland's Children's Hospital, which has a ward that bears her name. Jeanette managed the family household and the family's 120-acre ranch in Union City, which the sisters refused to sell to developers and left to the East Bay Regional Park District.

In 1916, the family bought the lot next door to the Alameda Street house and tore down the house on it. The three-lot parcel, which opens onto Encinal Avenue, has a refreshingly spacious feel.

PLAIN EXTERIOR

Per capita, Alameda has one of the greatest concentrations of Victorian homes in the United States. Up against the splendors in the streets around, the plain facade of the Meyers House isn't much to write home about, and its exterior is in need of a paint job.

As the front door opens, the house reveals its splendors: the ornate mirrors, the Italian statuary collected by the sisters on their travels, the Persian rugs and the fleets of hand-painted china and crystal. Portraits of the young sisters in their lace and ribbons, with whimsical expressions, stand on the Steinway grand alongside those of Henry Meyers and Bertha in her shapely whale-bone bodice.

The dining room is appointed in polished curly redwood, with a dining room table in appliqued oak that has eight extra leaves and takes three men to lift.

Upstairs, a pair of tiny high-buttoned shoes that belonged to Mildred sits on the brass bed in the children's bedroom. Bertha's beaded silk shoes, in black (unusually long, because she was tall), are laid out in the master bedroom. In the back bedroom is a crazy quilt Bertha made, over-stitched in scraps of satin and painted velvet, that looks as if it had been put together yesterday.

A glass cabinet on the landing with choice Meyers possessions holds Henry's mustache cup and an embryonic typewriter. Two wind-up Victrola gramophones stand ready to play foxtrots for the sisters, like "Two Little Girls in Blue" and "Annie Murphy."

In the kitchen, a cookbook is open to a recipe for beefsteak and oysters, by an ancient packet of Drifted Snow flour. Years ago, the kitchen was redone in salmon pink and linoleum. Volunteers stripped the linoleum, sanded the wood floor and restored the room to a suitably Victorian hunter green.

"Everything was waxed and dusted, cleaned and scrubbed," said Bridgette Snyder, who is known as the Meyers House First Lady and the guiding spirit of the volunteer corps. The restoration took about nine months and cost only $30,000, thanks to the donated labor.

The volunteer spirit lives on. On one recent visit, the president of the Alameda Historical Society was in the garden outside with spatters of white paint all over her arms, preparing picket fences for the flower beds with her husband.

Curator Gunn, who came searching for a Victorian home for himself in Alameda in the '70s, recalls how apologetic real estate agents were if a home's fixtures weren't modernized. Now they're boasting if the original appointments are intact. Gunn has had fun finding room in the Meyers House for pieces from the Alameda Museum's collections. In Alameda, people have a lot of treasures to donate.

Gunn takes his custodianship seriously. "This house is loved," he says. Pollutants in the air can eat away the delicate textiles, and it's his mission to keep them at bay. He and an Alameda couple come in once a month on their own time to clean and vacuum, a nightmare, one imagines, given the number of artifacts.

Luckily for them, lots of earthquake putty holds the pieces in place. "It makes it so much easier to dust," Gunn says enthusiastically.

DIRECTIONS

From the south: Take Hwy. 880 north to 23rd Avenue exit. turn left at the signal, proceed back over the freeway and go straight over the Park Street bridge. Turn right on Encinal Avenue, right on Willow and left on Alameda Avenue. The house is on the right, at No. 2021. From San Francisco: Go over the Bay Bridge and take Hwy. 880 south to 23rd Avenue exit. Follow over the Park Street bridge and turn right on Encinal Avenue. Turn right on Willow and left on Alameda. The house is on the right.